The present book provides scholars as well as students access toprimary sources critical to understanding the intellectual life ofRussia's Muslims in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Through Ismail Gasprali's French and African Letters Professor Rorlichoffers evidence regarding the scope of Muslim modernism in lateimperial Russia contributing at the same time to a betterunderstanding of the debates on gender issues that shaped themodernist discourse.

This volume represents the first annotated English translation ofIsmail Gasprali's fictional travelogue, first serialized in hisnewspaper Terjuman between 1887 and 1891. Providing a window into thediversity of the issues that shaped the Muslim modernist discourse inRussia, this publication offers one of the few opportunities toexamine primary source material in a field still marked by the paucityof such materials available in English translation. This annotatedtranslation makes an important contribution to the field of Eurasianscholarship not only for bringing to the students of Muslim modernismand gender studies an important work of Ismail Gasprali -- one of theleading Muslim reformers of the Russian empire, but also for offeringan Introduction that places the French and African Letters in thebroader context of his work.